Of Ellen Glasgow. An Inscribed Portrait

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OF ELLEN GLASGOW AN INSCRIBED PORTRAIT
By ELLEN GLASGOW & BRANCH CABELL
New York The Maverick Press 1938

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THE INSCRIPTION
By ELLEN GLASGOW

To be candidly portrayed by the more distinguished of one's contemporaries is always, I imagine, a double-edged honour. Yet, whether or not I recognize as my own portrait the result of "the author of Jurgen's" sharpened pen, I have little difficulty in identifying the author of They Stooped to Folly as she should wish to be.
As beginning authors, inaccurately termed romancer and realist, he and I have lived with equal discretion in the same place and period. Nevertheless, we have approached our subject, the ironic perversity of human nature, from opposite directions and contrasting angles of vision. While, in youth, he exalted the glamour of chivalry, I examined the shabbiness. But beneath the glamour and the shabbiness, the realities of our surroundings were inseparable. And, for my part, I am suitably grateful that I may share, however undeservingly, in the reflected glories of Poictesme.

Half title page:
OF ELLEN GLASGOW

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THE PORTRAIT
By BRANCH CABELL

When I consider her as a person she arouses in me a dark suspicion. I fear that Ellen Glasgow is a gentlewoman as well as a genius in an era unfavorable to either capacity. I am certain that even if she had not ever completed that superb social history of Virginian culture which blind fortune has lately bestowed upon an unmeriting world, in twelve suitably handsome volumes, she would yet remain none the less a personage.
A little too much has been made, I think, of Ellen Glasgow's revolt against the formalized traditions of the Old South. Beyond any question, as a writer, she has viewed these traditions with disrespect. Yet, as a person, she has she has very sensibly fallen in with that formalized and amiably luxurious manner of living to which she was born, not violating that manner, but simply making it more ample, and modernizing it, in the fine, ancient "town house" of her ancestors. She has remained, in brief, as a person, somewhat the grande dame; and as one result of this, she is not lightly approachable. In her presence you treat your P's and your Q's with all proper respect.
I forget just how many persons live in Richmond; but I do know that several hundreds of them nurture the as yet foiled ambition of being "invited to Miss Glasgow's." Well, and they never will be "invited to Miss Glasgow's" because of this or the other delinquency, whether it be in charm or in intelligence or in what we Richmonders still refer to, in our quaint way, as "breeding.” This leads to despair and heart- burning, and occasionally to yet other results.
For example, a good two years ago, when Ellen Glasgow was entertaining in honor of Gertrude Stein, upon a scale suitably splendid, an admirer of Miss Stein made bold to attend the reception without being invited. What happened then is still talked about in Richmond; and I am sorry I cannot relate in this place just what did happen. What happened was peculiarly tragic, and indeed demolishing, from the offender's point of view; and I can assure you the offence will not ever be repeated.
Ellen Glasgow, then, as a person, is candidly exclusive. If you take that to imply any snobbishness, you are wrong beyond the limits of my vocabulary: I do not know of any living being more magnanimous or, for that matter, more affable than is Ellen Glasgow. It is simply that she does not cherish dullness or vulgarity; and being under no compulsion to put up with them, doesn't. To the large host of her personal friends there is no woman more trustworthy, more exhilarating, more generous, more complaisant or more dear; and in fact a dangerously great number of her friends make a sort of cult of her. If they have not spoiled Ellen Glasgow during all these years, that is merely because she was born unspoilable.
I speak of "all these years." At rare intervals it occurs to me that Ellen is not any longer a young woman. I consider the arithmetical proofs of this fact, for a suitable while, with due deference; and I then dismiss them as self-evident fallacies. In every way except intellectually she is quite the youngest person I know of: she diffuses indeed enough youthful vitality to supply an orphan asylum: and when, not very long ago, in talking with me, she referred to her gray hair, it was with a sense of shock, and with some sudden surprise, that I perceived she was not talking nonsense. During the forty years I had known her I had never noticed anything of the sort; and I promptly forgot the irrelevant hirsute detail, now that this glowing-eyed and wholly beautiful woman began to tell me just exactly what she did think about one of our fellow authors, whose name is not either here nor there.
I agreed with her, stifling my envy as best I might; for some reason or another, male authors, howsoever arduously they may labor, simply do not ever acquire this knack of combining polite sympathy with annihilation: but I inferred, too, that gray hairs have not of necessity anything to do with the slackness of senescence. I perceived that Ellen Glasgow remained a young woman so far as went those several thousands of earthly matters which interest her very vividly, and which thus keep perpetual her youth.
Now, in chief does Ellen Glasgow love dogs; and second only to dogs, all forms of animal life except human beings; and thereafter literature. Here her range is wide, yet she admires cordially only two women writers, one of whom is Jane Austen, and I agree with Ellen about the other.
I do not know whether logic or loyalty ranks next in the esteem of Ellen Glasgow; but they are both jostled now and then by her love for an epigram. Moreover, in all persons who review books her interest is considerable; she is not ever unkind to them. She loves likewise old furniture; and philosophy in book form; and age-old gardens; and lavishness in her gift-giving; and gossip; and pessimism, to an extent which she occludes from her fiction, reserving the full force of it for her proposed autobiography; and detective stories; and every conceivable nature of large or small china figure which represents this or the other sort of dog. Of these last she has a hundred or so. With an unfeminine fondness does she cherish, a bit even above the exploits of Dr. Reginald Fortune or of M. Hercule Poirot, the brave novels of Alexandre Dumas; and she loves too to give a dinner party.
To the other side, she has but a trinity of dislikes. She loathes sentimentality. Her fellow creatures she does not love en masse with an entire cordiality; and even though she was raised in the best Presbyterian principles, her affection for Jehovah remains temperate.
That listing sounds rather miscellaneous, I admit. I mean only that through her delight in, or through her dislike of, these matters and a great many other matters, Ellen Glasgow continually rises in her private life to a sort of lyric intensity which is youth's self. I mean, in brief, that I can not recollect any single topic, howsoever commonplace or recondite, as to which her views are half-hearted, or uncertain, or above all, uninteresting.
I mean too that, although she irradiates in her private life that energy which is genius, that same energy which informs her books, yet in both fields she remains always, quite incommunicably, "well bred." Here is personality, a most vivid personality; and it is fortified, not veiled, by the tradition of aristocracy. For in Richmond we, as yet, cherish both; even though as goes the literary cockpit, I can not but grant the combination to appear out of place, in our present era of serious and painstaking studies of the mentally underprivileged, by their peers, in the proletarian novel.
Yet, for one, I like the alliance. I admire both the genius and the grande dame, as being strange rarities nowadays. When I find the two combined in one person, I applaud something rather like a miracle.

Colophon:
This volume, which is the only book ever done in collaboration by Ellen Glasgow and Branch Cabell, is herewith presented in Truesdell Italic, an exclusive type loaned for the purpose by Frederic W. Goudy, who also has drawn two initial letters especially for this work. The job was composed, printed and bound by hand by Earl H. Emmons, with title page done by Goudy in Trajan Capitals. The book is issued in an edition of Ninety- seven and Twelve copies and it is Item Nr. Thirty-five of the Maverick Press of New York, 1938

Of Ellen Glasgow: An Inscribed Portrait

Of Ellen Glasgow. An Inscribed Portrait

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